Baptist Church at a fateful moment. In May 1845, in a schism over the issue of slaveholders serving as missionaries, Baptist delegates from nine southern states seceded from the national body to create the Southern Baptist Convention. Northern Baptists fervently believed that abolitionism was consistent with their opposition to ecclesiastical hierarchy, their populist spirit, and their broad-based campaign to purge sin from society. The Second Great Awakening had explicitly linked personal conversion with community reform, spawning political activism.
